News
Oct. 20, 2021
The Sugar Wife to open Nov. 17 at Clarion University’s Little Theatre
Nic is currently in rehearsals directing Elizabeth Kuti’s historical drama The Sugar Wife. Set in 1850, the play concerns an Irish Quaker woman who spends her time and her husband’s considerable wealth helping her city’s poor as well as the global fight to abolish slavery. She convinces her husband to sponsor a free woman of color to come to Dublin to give lectures on her family history and experiences with slavery in the southern US. What this Irish Quaker woman learns about her husband’s dealings in the tea and sugar trade during this visit turns her world upside down.
The show runs Nov. 17 - 20 at 8:00 pm, and Nov. 21 at 2:00 pm at the Little Theatre in the Marwick-Boyd Fine Arts Center. Tickets are $12 for adults and free to CUP Students.
On Friday, Nov. 19, spectators are invited to stay after the performance for a discussion panel featuring an intersectional and interdisciplinary group of Clarion scholars and student representatives from the Clarion University chapter of Black Lives Matter and the Black Student Union.
SEPT. 26, 2021
FORTHCOMING: THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND THEATRE OF THE ABSURD
Dr. Barilar is collaborating with Oxford University’s Dr. Hannah Simpson on a chapter for the Routledge Companion to Literature and Theatre of the Absurd, edited by Michael Y. Bennett. “Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd in the Age of Decolonization” radically re-situates the so-called “theatre of the absurd” in the age of decolonization. It argues that Martin Esslin’s application of Albert Camus’s philosophy of the absurd to the plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet (among others) incinerates cultural difference in the guise of universal humanism — a logic that props up white supremacy. The plays themselves, we argue, are better understood as critiquing such violence inherent in European modernity, perhaps most viscerally on display in France’s decolonial wars in Africa and Asia.
Aug. 30, 2021
Upcoming Productions
Dr. Barilar will be directing two productions this coming year for Clarion University Theatre. The first will be Elizabeth Kuti’s The Sugar Wife. In this historical drama, an Irish Quaker couple sponsors a free woman of color to come to Dublin to give lectures on her experiences with the horrors of slavery in the USA. What the couple learns turns their world upside down. The Sugar Wife will run Nov. 17—21, 2021. The second production is Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King. Identified by critic Martin Esslin as a key text in what he called the “theatre of the absurd,” in this comedy a centuries-old king refuses to acknowledge that he is dying… and that his kingdom is vanishing with him! This production will run April 6—10, 2022. The other productions in the season at Clarion University include Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild and the musical [title of show]. Visit Clarion’s Online Box Office to order tickets!
Aug. 9, 2021
New Job
Dr. Barilar has accepted a position to work as a temporary, full-time faculty member in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Clarion University of Pennsylvania! Dr. Barilar will be teaching three courses and directing a production for Clarion University Theatre each semester. Watch this space for additional updates.
Visit the website for Clarion’s Department of Visual and Performing Arts to learn more.
Aug. 3, 2021
Dissertation: Defended!
Yesterday, August 2, 2021, Nic successfully defended his dissertation, “Moving Censorship: Transnational Performances of Banned Irish Plays, 1957—63.” Dr. Barilar would like to thank his committee, chair and advisor Dr. Michelle Granshaw, friends and colleagues at Pitt, family, and especially his wife, Danielle for their support over the years!
Feb. 7, 2021
Forthcoming: The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship
Nic’s historical research will appear in the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship. Edited by Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders, the book will include more than 35 chapters by historians, theatre practitioners, and censorship activists from around the world. Re-examining well-known cases, intervening into modern debates, and contributing new histories and theories of censorship, the book represents a major contribution to the scholarship on theatre censorship.
Nic’s chapter will provide the first history of Bloomsday, Allan McClelland’s adaptation of James Joyce’s infamous novel Ulysses. The chapter chronicles the play’s return to Dublin in 1962 after the Archbishop of Dublin protested its inclusion in the 1958 Dublin International Theatre Festival. By attending to Joyce’s censorious pasts on both sides of the Atlantic, the case study illumines how the circulation of censorship histories impacted the play’s production in Dublin and offers a transnational methodology for analyzing that movement.
Nov. 20, 2020
Beckett Beyond the Normal now available
Nic’s essay, “Beckett’s Queer Time of Défaillance: Ritual and Resistance in Happy Days,” has been published in the collection Beckett Beyond the Normal.
Edited by Seán Kennedy and published by Edinburgh University Press, this collection of essays explores Samuel Beckett’s artistic vision at the intersection of queer, disability and posthumanist studies. Why did Beckett write so often about mental illness, disability, perversion? Why did he take such an interest in ‘abnormals’ and ‘degenerates’? How did he reconceive ‘the human’ in the wake of Hitler and Stalin? Drawing on Beckett’s voluminous archive, as well as his primary texts, the authors use psychoanalysis, queer theory, disability theory and biopolitics to push Beckett studies beyond the normal.